Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta (Part 1)

A different snapshot into the Cyber Security world… can the vulnerability management providers actually see the entire network?

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Lumeta.

Pat Donnellan: First of all, let me introduce Lumeta. Lumeta is a New Jersey-based company in the cyber security space. The software was originally conceived within the environment of Bell Labs to facilitate the US government DOD to understand, at that point, the Internet. It was originally conceived as a scanning and mapping tool to identify devices and IP addresses on a worldwide basis. That was the original concept. It evolved when a number of investors that put a lot of money into it to build it out. I, along with a number of other individual investors, bought the business just over two years ago. In essence, we bought it on the premise that the future of cyber security centered on real-time as opposed to continuous.

There’s a big distinction there. Real-time network situational awareness – meaning in enterprises and government agencies, the basic premise of Lumeta is without our product, you do not understand your network. You have a 15% to 20% visibility gap in devices, networks, IP addresses, and leaks that no other technology effectively addresses. Therefore, in the context of building a cyber stack, which is being built on the assumption that no single vendor or provider addresses the entirety of the solution required. That’s a first-order premise. We’re foundational in the sense that one, we provide the updated version of the product we acquired. In other words, you can continuously scan and index your network such that you have an ongoing iteration of what’s happening in the segmentation of network across your organization. That’s one requirement from a compliance standpoint and up to relatively recently has been accepted as the standard on which other products build their effectiveness.

Sramana Mitra: Your segment within the cyber security space is audit and compliance?

Pat Donnellan: No, that’s one space. That audit and compliance requirement typically needs a number of points in time such that you can validate that you are in control of your network from a compliance standpoint. That’s one dimension. We have taken that product, updated it, rendered it into a software format under a Linux platform that we have rewritten and put a whole bunch of new features like auto scheduling and comparison of scanning. We do that agent-lessly and in a mode that can scale to millions of IP addresses and devices within an enterprise, with no agent and scalable to literally the world. That’s one product and one element, and that’s what we acquired.

What we have developed in the last two years is the real-time network situational awareness product suite. Meaning that on a continuous basis, real-time, we are actively and passively listening to network traffic so that we can again get the changes that are occurring in the network environment. More crucially in the world today, the cloud-enabled, mobile-enabled movements are immediately trackable and can be alerted against policies.

In other words, if you are in an M&A activity and you have a lockdown on your network. As you seek to integrate another company, we can tell you in real-time whether that policy has been breached with respect to the network that has been locked down. This would be similar to the television business where they may be running the Olympics for example. They will say, “For two months before and two months after this event, no changes to the network.” We can alert you in real-time if that has been breached. As in the case of the financial world where a specific network may not reach out into the outer world, we can alert you in real-time if that occurs. That’s the second part of our offering.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Pat Donnellan, CEO of Lumeta
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